Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis and other scores

Here is something I that came to mind when we were discussing Ellie's music box project.




Youtube has interesting material on Iannis Xenakis.

Preparation for Feedback (exercise four)

This is an organisational task

Please use time available during the week to prepare the following:

1. A statement paragraph that explains how you see the work you are making. This should incorporate a list of the ways that an audience is helped to understand the work as a result of decision you have made.

2. Record your work photographically, in a manner that supports your way of seeing the project; consider proving evidence of scale, materiality, and context in these photos.

3. Make available one piece of external research that might be read in association with seeing your work. This could be from a book, website, journal article, magazine, or non published found material.

4. In retrospect design a simple diagram that explains the evolution of your idea using key headings that suggest the important points which have occurred in your project and demonstrates how they might be connected.

This material will be collected off you in the week five class,
(Thursday the 3rd of April)

Photographic note taking, (exercise 3)

The task
The task from last week suggested your chosen objects could be considered the site for experimentation and proposed some ways of investigating different ways of seeing your materials through experimentation in different modes.

This week the task focuses on the collection of ephemeral information from the larger landscape that you occupy as an artist. The mode for this activity is photographic and consists of two stages

1. Using a digital camera ( cellphone is fine, if that is what you have available) take pictures of the physical world as you come across things that interest you. The focus should still be on objects that exist in a landscape. This photography is intended as moving your ideas about your larger project forward. The images you take should therefore relate to this project in a way you can articulate to the group.

You might choose to look for things which could be seen as connected to your starting point or these new images could act as a counterpoint or way of looking that runs contrary to the process that you are already involved in.

2.Having taken photos( twenty could be a good number to aim for, but this is up to you), select a final group to present together as thumbnails on a single A4. How you organise the images should be suggestive of the interest they hold for you.

Please have this printed in time for the Thursday class.

Experimentation with objects ( exercise two)

Sculpture 304: Week 3
You are being asked to experiment by using processes of:
physical interaction,exchange, alteration, description and analysis

Consider effect of the following actions on your chosen object.

Sound recording
Pressuring
Sharing/ distribution
Placement
Rotation
Abbreviation

Summery: 6 processes
1.Information should be retained from each activity.

2. Keep a record of any changes in the way you think about your object.

3. Each process is imagined to require half an hour to an hour of your time.

This is the second exercise. The first is your statement. All exercises can be continued beyond the week they are discussed. Evidence of their completion should be included within presented research at the project's end.

Workshops for sculpture

The first stream of workshops happens tomorrow morning at nine. Could this group please meet myself and the technicians involved outside Greg Dyer and Graeme Brett's offices (behind the metal workshop). Could the couple of people wanting to swap streams come along to this meeting and also confirm with me via email that they would like to swap The class will run between two and four. It is important that we begin promptly.

You will need:
1. A bullet pointed version of your statements of intent
2. A notebook and Pen
3. Your starting objects

The workshop format
Each week there will be two types of activity occurring within the workshops; Firstly a specific class. This will run over three weeks and is intended to provided an introduction three areas of technical process. 1. Mold making and flexible casting, (Greg), 2.Aluminum casting, (Graeme) 3. Welding, (Nick). These run one after an other, through the semester.

While these classes are being taken by those requiring instruction the technicians not class teaching are expecting to work with the other students on an individual basis. This interaction will revolve around students exploring the brief through materials exploration. The technicians will offer their own suggestions as to how students might work through new processes and expand on skills they already have.

All students are expected to be based in the workshop for the period of the workshop session.

In developing work in the workshop students are expected to consider the project's assessment objectives:
These involve the demonstration of
• An active process of research, that brings new information into the working process
• The learning of new skills
• A development arc that indicates a reflective and analytic process

1.Attendance is mandatory at all workshop sessions students are enrolled in. An inability to attend should be communicated to myself, (prior to the absence)
Workshop staff will be taking a roll.

2.Students are expected to retain documentation of the practical development of their ideas and use drawing processes in the communication of their ideas with all staff. Evidence of this is expected to feature in the research component of assessed work.

3. The staff involved have offered to run the Friday afternoon session on Wednesday afternoon( 2- 4 pm). This would have the effect of giving the third year sculpture group priority access to the workshop all day on Wednesday. This would need to work for the large majority of those currently booked in the Friday stream. Could the Friday stream people email me and let me know their preference Any change to the arrangement will need to wait until next week to take effect. I will wait until I have received responses from those affected before making any change to arrangements as they stand. If it is easiest then we will stick to the present plan. That is to say two streams on Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon)

Thanks any questions please be in touch with me

Project group

Sian Arthur
Yoonkyung Chang
Sung-Hi Cho
Matthew Coldicutt
Ellen Claire Jones
Zachary John Langdon-Pole
Lia Isabella Aphra Kent Mackillop
Ruby Janice Read
(all Wednesday workshops)

Akura Te Mata O Tahiti Makea-Pardington
Richard James Bennett
Hannah Bowerbank
Soo Hyun Byun
Emily Grimston
Shinae Suh
Brydie Catherine Wilson
Renee Archer
(all Friday workshops)

Please confirm via email should you need to change groups, (you will need to find someone to swap with).

The brief: a few points

The making starting point: find a couple of small objects that interested you.
These should be things that provide reasons for curiosity in a way that could be explored through making.
The objects should appear open to formal discussion. This means they can be discussed in terms of their parts and effect of this particular combination on the whole and its surroundings. Their form might communicate something unlikely or incongruous perhaps to do with scale or use.

Statements of intent: are due Tuesday the 10th of March.
You should establish the length appropriate to your ideas, three hundred words will likely cover things, at this stage.

You are free to work as you think makes sense but your intentions should involve a response to the brief.

The brief aims to encourage students to begin with objects from the world and use a process of consideration and analysis to develop an idea from this starting point.

Sculptural Evidence

1. Outline of Project

‘Evidence is evidence, whether words, numbers, images, diagrams, still or moving. The intellectual tasks remain constant regardless of the mode of evidence: to understand and to reason about the materials at hand and to appraise their quality, relevance and integrity.
Science and art have in common intense seeing, the wide- eyed observing that generates empirical information. Beautiful evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how empirical observations turn into explanations and evidence’.
Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, Graphic Press LLC,2006

TASK
This project will ask students to develop a project, which considers the structure and nature of a selected inanimate object.


DESCRIPTION
Using observation and analysis students will investigate the form and potential meaning of a found object, (or series of objects).
Students will use processes of replication and adaptation as they develop a sculptural project, which considers the form of the original object and then develops new meaning as a result of actions performed.


PROCESS
The project will involve firstly an initial process of information gathering that will be followed by an evaluation of this material along formal lines. Students will practice using the language of sculpture, considering ways of looking that consider

• Tension: mass and potential, surface and volume
• Scale: contextual and formal
• Material signification



Ideas developed in this process will then be experimented with though individually formulated sculptural activity.
Workshop practice is intended to reflect and provide the means for this experimentation.
It is expected that by the completion of the project students will be able to show an idea developed from a stage of initial research through to physical experimentation that results in three completed works.

All work will be designed to incorporate the studio as an aspect of the work. Examples are:
• The use of furniture either as armature or plinth
• An incorporation of the immediate environment’s surfaces to extend the work



MATERIALS
• Each student should decide on their own materials but these should be open to manipulation and useful alongside the materials used in the workshop processes.
• Students should consider time-frame when considering materials and processes
All projects will incorporate skills learn't in the 3D workshops allied to the paper:


ASSESSMENT
To achieve well students will need to demonstrate:
• An active process of research, which incorporates new information into art making processes
• Making that involves the learning of new skills in a manner that has an effect on the work produced
• Evidence of a body of thinking that is achieved through artworks. This should retain significant moments but also results that tell the story of a developing idea.
• A development arc that indicates a reflective and analytic process